Virtual Worlds, Collaboration, and Workplace Productivity

Workshop Motivation & Goals

The role of collaborative technologies in games does much more than enable chat between participants. They enable the emergence of persistent virtual relationships, and with them, new forms of social organization, modes of collaboration, microeconomies, educational infrastructures, and bureaucracies (Ducheneaut et al, 2006; Bardzell & Bardzell, 2007). These gaming technologies support and encourage collaboration, group formation, and knowledge management in-game and in content authoring, scripting, UI design and criticism, etc.

Due to the increasing popularity of these spaces, significant virtual collaborations now move beyond office walls and take place among passionate and distributed hobbyists, blurring the distinctions between work and play. These technologies are success stories in bringing pleasure and distributed productivity together. At the same time, they are also the locus of innovation in HCI; for example, the World of Warcraft community, enabled by an easy to use API and encouragement from the game publisher, has designed hundreds of user interface “mods” (add-ons, plug-ins, and widgets), which have been downloaded by millions of players.

As recent shifts in CSCW are beginning to show (Brown & Barkhuus, 2007; Brown & Bell, 2004; Chao, 2001) these phenomena have implications for the design of collaborative application and knowledge management software in the workplace.  Developing strategies for understanding and studying how virtual worlds can be appropriated in the workplace is timely and important. Not only are corporations moving into this space, but the significant elements of the workforce have long been using these technologies and have been learning how to be productive with (and sometimes in spite of) them.

The workshop has the following goals:

• Improve our understanding of how virtual worlds support collaboration from small groups to a truly massive scale.
• Construct an inventory of research methodologies that are productive in the study of virtual worlds, and particularly those geared toward the design of virtual worlds for workplace collaboration and service.
• Critique the false dichotomies between work and play, which limit our capacity to benefit from their profound overlaps.
• Articulate the value of virtual worlds for fostering collaboration in business settings
• Lay out an agenda for research and design that reflects the values and goals expressed in the workshop.